It is natural to wonder whether proponents of project management, who do project-related work professionally, walk the talk on the projects they undertake professionally. I believe I do, and dozens of people have been kind enough to write detailed recommendations elaborating that trait on my LinkedIn profile. But it’s a whole other matter to apply project management to one’s own personal projects, i.e. the projects one encounters in one’s personal or family life, not the ones you get paid to undertake as a professional. For example, a personal project I have just begun is the Navy SEAL Bonefrog Challenge.

I have learned that when it comes to personal projects, sometimes it is better to apply one’s project management techniques without drawing any attention to it, as was the case halfway through preparations for our wedding when I told my wife we needed to use proven project management methods to ensure the wedding would be a success. Whew boy! Lesson learned. By contrast, other kinds of personal projects can sometimes benefit from a bit of advertisement and accountability before they are finished, like the Bonefrog Challenge.

Two years ago, I ran the Navy SEAL Bonefrog Challenge for the first time. Repeated annually, the Bonefrog is a renown obstacle course race designed and operated by Navy SEALs, arguably the most elite special operations warriors on the planet. The Bonefrog features 50+ daunting obstacles, e.g. barbed wire to belly crawl under, vertical walls to climb over, hills to run up carrying bags of rocks, 50 foot ropes to ascend and descend without breaking your neck, etc. Despite my experience in project management, I hadn’t prepared at all. To give you a sense of how green I was, frankly, I ate corn beef hash for breakfast. Then I showed up to the race but left my ID in the car and had to run back to get it so the SEALs would agree to put a GPS tracker on my ankle and let me run. By the time I sprinted back up to the race, I was looking at an empty field, as the race had already started 15 minutes ago. I asked the SEAL with the starter gun if I could go, and he barked “That’s the spirit. GO, GO, GO!” I lost my breakfast by the first obstacle. At one point I ascended a huge hill, which was so hard that I was convinced I would have a heart attack. I convinced myself that it must be the end of the race. Surely people would die beyond this point, I said to myself. But when I got to the top, a SEAL barked at me “Good job! You’re halfway there!” I did not quit, and I did not die, and after it was all said and done, to my surprise, I came in 6th place within the group running with me. The secret is: just don’t quit. Never quit.

Next year a day before my 47th birthday, I will run it again. But this time I will do it as a Tier-1 competitor, running a distance over twice what I ran before with as many more obstacles. Like most projects, preparation is the key, a lesson hammered into me again on the first Bonefrog. The race itself is the equivalent of project deployment, i.e. the end of the thing. The real work happens beforehand, which is where I find myself now. I am just getting over the flu, so it’s all uphill from here. Lame pun intended (and excused due to illness).

Nine out of ten PMI members don’t realize that PMI’s project management framework for Initiating, Planning, Executing, Controlling, and Closing a project (or IPECC) does not denote sequential phases. During project initiating, project planning begins, and before planning is finished, project executing begins. While these things are happening project monitoring and controlling must occur. I’ll apply IPECC correctly this time around on the Bonefrog, keeping in mind a saying the SEALs have made famous: “The only easy day was yesterday.” In a matter of months we’ll see how project closing goes.

Have you unlocked the power of project management? Are you and your teams willing to promote their projects before success is assured? You can enjoy that kind of confidence. Make achieving excellence in project management your own personal project. Contact us today for mentoring in proven project management techniques.

"The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear." Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)

Is the use of slave labor on large infrastructure projects a real thing in this day and age? Indeed it is. One may be forgiven for overlooking slavery as a valid strategy transparently situated and socially accomplished by sanctioned parties to develop the physical structures intrinsic to modern society. But this strategy-as-practice that turns people into property to erect our public works is a global standard. Over 20 million men, women, and children are trapped in forced labor worldwide, generating over $40 billion annually in profits for their captors. One would expect slavers everywhere to garner nasty reputations in the process, but they are glorified for roads and reservoirs, fabrications and fundaments, and pipelines and parks.

Across America every single day, more than 800,000 prisoners are forced to work without any choice in the matter. Whether prison labor constitutes slave labor has been an ongoing debate in the United States ever since the 13th amendment both abolished slavery and legalized it in the case of prisoners. Slavery was deemed despicable unless the slave owner was the state, in which case slavery was not only righteous but profitable. Beyond America's borders, slave-based business strategies abound unencumbered by this cognitive dissonance, and cities the world over are built by slaves provisioned by merchants to municipalities. Evidenced by the extent to which the public takes it for granted internationally (or fails to recognize it), slavery is a global institution.

I have witnessed it firsthand, auditing megaprojects that used unskilled Chinese prisoners who had been shipped from China to other countries as compulsory labor camps. With no other pedigree than imprisonment, they were conscripted to build roads and bridges under harsh conditions on behalf of the state actors importing them. This open secret only came to my attention as I forced my way through layers of subcontracting to investigate the root causes of rampant quality issues on behalf of a client. I was not the first to learn bridges were failing because they had been built by slaves no more skilled in architecture than astrophysics. I was merely the first to report it to my client, recognizing that the project teams, project sponsors, and even the public were complicit.

Slavers run a gauntlet of public perception, parrying issues of legitimacy and efficacy arbitrated by what the ancient Greeks called the polis and we know as the body of citizens. Do you care who builds your bridges provided they get you from A to B? More to the point, who makes the slavers' reputations: do they or do you? As conceits of the collective consciousness, reputations reflect social mores, just as the choices you make regarding the reputations you assign others reflect you. The matter is thrown into sharp relief by the dramatic realities of human bondage, begging the question "Who is the criminal in this endeavor?" The prisoners? Their wardens? The sellers? The buyers? The beneficiaries? The bystanders? You and me?

Dostoevsky said the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. But we need look no further than our roads, rails, tunnels, and bridges. State-sponsored servitude will collapse in an instant when the public’s consent is withdrawn. In the words of La Boétie, "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.” Once you resolve not to serve those who reduce people to objects, you will experience true freedom and, hopefully, the respect you deserve.

Do you want to find out what is really going on in projects across your supply chain and secure your reputation? We can help. Our uncommon skills afford uncommon insights. Contact us today.

I gave the closing keynote yesterday at the CWCC in Vancouver, which I was told is the largest project management conference in Canada. The title of my talk was “Delivering Innovative Projects Predictably Using SIMPLE® - How TransLink Is Transforming Its Project Delivery Capability.” TransLink, the rapid mass transit authority that builds roads and rails for metro Vancouver's 2.3 million residents, hired OPM Experts LLC to assess their infrastructure project management capabilities, and then joined me on stage to talk about it. As my company had just completed their SIMPLE® maturity assessment, I was delighted they gave the audience a peek inside their complicated, fascinating organization. TransLink did a fantastic job, the audience was rapt, and we had a great discussion.

Before TransLink joined me on stage, I described the relationships between:

I explained how to increase an organization’s maturity and capability to select and deliver projects that deploy the different kinds of innovation (modular, incremental, architectural, and ultimately radical innovations), starting with an OPM maturity assessment using SIMPLE®.

Thank you, TransLink, for the awesome projects you create and for sharing your insights with the audience. I look forward to the journey ahead.

Thank you, PMI West Canada, for hosting this event and for the lovely accommodations at the five-star Fairmont Pacific Rim. My wife and I have savored superb views of the harbor, watching the seaplanes thrown into sharp relief by mountains and sky.

Seaplanes taxi fellow travelers.

What better way to wrap things up than hiking the North Shore mountains with Vancouver’s infrastructure displayed across the city below? I took advantage of a photo op on Grouse Mountain and imagined the Scandinavians who first hauled planks through an untamed forest up to where I stood to create its nascent infrastructure. Who can deny they were innovators? It's a tradition carried on by TransLink, building transportation infrastructure for Vancouver's residents wherever they live, work, and play.

In the previous three parts of this article, we have seen how talking about improving strategy-implementation capabilities in terms of horse-racing can demystify capability-building. In Part 1, we explored standardization. In Part 2, we explored measurement. In Part 3, we explored both control and continuous improvement. These are the four maturity levels of OPM3, a PMI standard that gives users the option of progressing through these maturity levels in any combination of three domains: the project, program, and portfolio management domains. The idea is that you must combine these three domains to turn ideas into results or to convert strategies into outcomes, and to be able to do that capably you must progress through the agendas (or maturity levels) of standardization, measurement, control, and continuous improvement.

I have explained the detailed aspects of each of the maturity levels, which I know intimately because they are details that I personally authored and wove into the original OPM3 standard, and they are what made that model work. Unfortunately, those essential details have become lost to most users over time, which is one of the critical weaknesses of the way that PMI standards are created and managed, i.e. centralization. PMI extracted the important details from OPM3 and repackaged them as software which they rented to users for many thousands of dollars, eventually pricing themselves out of the market. Hopefully PMI will correct the situation by making that content available to users again. When PMI does that, users will need to know that there are things that OPM3 does not prescribe which they will need to decide. In other words, there were some spaces that were intentionally left blank for you to fill in.

For example, in the previous installments of this article, I wrote about “speed” and “safety.” But OPM3 does not prescribe either “speed” or “safety” as aspects of performance that must be measured. In fact, OPM3 does not specify any metrics. When I originated and led the program to create OPM3, I ensured that OPM3 was agnostic regarding metrics. I did this because PMI’s policy when our team created OPM3 was that PMI standards must be generic enough to be applicable to most organizations most of the time. For years I have been outspoken that standards are maps and that the world needs many of them (not simply one generic map that is abstract enough to be applicable to everyone but customized for nobody). From the outset of the OPM3 Program in 1998, I advocated for the identification of contingency variables for developing Organizational Project Management maturity in different ways under different conditions (but this was removed from scope when the program was delayed a full year by PMI due to copyright issues). Indeed, the creation of industry standards should be decentralized through emerging technologies that include blockchain and allow the proliferation and customization of all kinds of maps. But that’s a story for another day.

The point about metrics is that every organization is different. The leaders of each organization should have the freedom to decide how their project, program, and portfolio management processes shall be measured. While this is a “feature” of OPM3, it might also be viewed as a “weakness,” depending on your perspective. To ensure it is a strength and not a weakness, you must choose an OPM consultant who has demonstrable expertise in Organizational Project Management metrics.

After OPM3 was published, OPM Experts LLC created a tool for identifying, developing, and implementing the correct OPM metrics in any organization. That proprietary tool is called the Strategy Implementation Maturity Protocol for Learning Enterprises (SIMPLE®). See http://www.opmexperts.com/simple. SIMPLE® has been used in many organizations to help them focus on the aspects of Organizational Project Management performance that are most relevant to their own environments (per figure 3).

Figure 3: SIMPLE® helps you improve performance.

SIMPLE® helps to accelerate the creation of capabilities via your OPM3 implementation. We supplement OPM3 with SIMPLE® to create a database that is custom designed for collecting the metrics most relevant to your organization. Contact us today to learn more about ways to take your organization to the highest levels of maturity and capability in Organizational Project Management. You can be a champion. You belong in the Winner's Circle.

Maturity recapitulates capability. That is a first principle of Organizational Project Management maturity. Let’s look at how we get there. In the first installment or Part 1 of this article, I noted the verb "to manage" was originally derived from the Italian word "maneggiare," meaning to handle and train horses, which is what sparked my idea that one can demystify the way that capabilities in strategy-implementation are created by talking about it in terms of horse-racing. Clearly I am actually interested in how to become capable of choosing good projects and delivering them well to implement one’s own organization’s strategies. But pretending that horse racing is our interest can be a useful thought experiment. In Part 2, I explained how standardization is followed by measurement. After standardization and after measurement, one can establish “control,” which is the pay-off. Standardization and measurement are pointless without control. Control is the goal because the control stage of maturity is when capabilities are created, i.e. the capabilities necessary to implement strategies through projects successfully, consistently, and predictably.

To establish the “Control” level of maturity in horse racing, we must do the following things:

Define capabilities. This means we must articulate operational definitions of process stability for the processes that were identified as important. If "speed" is important to us, then we must define what "speed" means, including what speed is too slow and what speed is too fast. If processes X, Y, and Z are essential for "speed," then we must articulate how they impact speed.

Document critical control points. We must identify the essential points in processes that must be controlled to produce speed in the manner that the organization requires speed to be produced.

Develop monitoring systems. We must develop a system for monitoring speed.

Develop process control plan. We must develop a plan for identifying when horse racing teams are not performing within the range of speed that is required. The plan must specify what will be done when this occurs and how performance will be reformed to expectations.

In addition to speed, I suggested “safety” as a possible metric. If the organization’s leaders decided that safety is an important metric, we would define what safety means, including minimum and maximum safety thresholds. For example, we might define safety as “avoiding serious injury,” where “serious injury means death, significant disfigurement, dismemberment, a fracture, a permanent loss of use of a body function, significant limitation of a body function, or a non-permanent injury preventing the person from performing his daily activities for not less than 90 days within the 180 days immediately following his accident.” This is called an operational definition, and its clarity makes evaluating safety easy. We would create operational definitions for each performance metric.

We would articulate how key processes impact the metric, in this case “safety,” e.g. warming up the horse, checking the saddle. We would identify essential points in the process that must be controlled, why, when, and how, e.g. checking the saddle to ensure it is secure before the horse leaves the paddock by reviewing the straps and buckles to ensure they are not loose, where "loose" is when straps shift more than 3 inches or buckles do not close fully.

You should notice that capabilities were not distinguished until the third level of maturity (per figure 2). If we could define these things in terms of the outcomes the organization wants and not simply in terms of process KPI’s at the beginning of the first level of maturity (instead of waiting until after our second maturity assessment to define these things), then we could develop capabilities faster. We recommend establishing control limits for outcomes in level 1. The reason that this nuance is important is because it focuses practitioners on the performance outcomes and discourages bureaucracy.

Figure 2: Maturity versus Capability

You should also notice that the organization's leaders can change their minds regarding the range of performance that is acceptable to them. If the maturity framework is in place, leaders may decide either to relax performance against a metric within the framework or to increase the rigor of performance that is required for a metric.

Leaders may change their minds about these things over time depending on developments in the organization's external environment. For example, if speed is important, and if competitors are getting faster, then leaders may decide that the speed of their own horses must increase to a level that addresses the new competitive environment.

After “Control,” to establish the final level of maturity in horse racing, which is called "Continuous Improvement" or simply “Improvement,” we must do the following things:

Cultivate widespread and decentralized participation in process improvement activities. This means that everyone from the owners of the horse racing team to the riders to the people who clean the stables are continuously looking for opportunities to improve their performance. It also means that these persons self-organize to experiment with improvements.

However, it also means that these self-organized teams must demonstrate that their experiments do not result in a loss of control or a lower capability than what was established in the previous level of maturity.

Executives may experiment with giving the riders more decision-making authority, or the riders may experiment with new equipment or tools, or the stable hands may change their own schedules in ways they believe will improve performance. Continuous improvement is encouraged at all levels of the management hierarchy and across all functions if these efforts do not decrease capabilities. Participants are rewarded when capabilities increase. At the highest level of maturity, capabilities can continue to increase to any extent required by your organization. For this reason, an organization at the highest level of maturity may not be as capable as another organization at the same level of maturity. Stay tuned for the final installment of this article: Part 4.

In Part 1, I noted the verb "to manage" was originally derived from the Italian word "maneggiare," meaning to handle and train horses, which is what inspired me to demystify the way that capabilities in strategy-implementation are created by talking about it in terms of horse-racing. Clearly I am actually interested in helping organizations become capable of choosing good projects and delivering them well to implement the organization’s strategies. But pretending that horse racing is our interest can be a useful thought experiment. It takes you out of your normal frame of reference and makes you look at things differently in ways that are instructive.

“Both the riders and the horses have roles in this.”

In Part 1, I explained standardization, which is the first agenda or level of maturity toward becoming capable. Standardization is consistent implementation of work methods. To enact standardization fully, one needs to pursue the next level of maturity, which is called “measurement.” Measurement includes the following things:

Identify critical characteristics of the horse racing process. We must articulate what is critical or essential for the process to produce a quality result.

Document "Results Measures." We must document the expected outputs and outcomes of the process and how those outputs and outcomes will be measured.

Document the measurement system. We must document how measurements will be taken.

Train stakeholders. We must train members of the organization in how to collect and analyze measurements.

Both the riders and the horses have roles in this. The riders must support each of these things and the horses must be trained in what to expect, learning how their performance will be measured. For example, they may be measured for "speed," and they may be measured for "safety." They will learn that these metrics are important and that the organization is tracking them closely.

The organization may already know intuitively that the performance of their horses occurs within a range that they expect. Or they may see that the range of variation in performance varies widely, and they will begin to uncover the reasons why.

Let’s talk about the sequence for doing things. Which came first: the chicken or the egg? For measurements of a process performed by people to be meaningful, the process has to be performed consistently first. If we are going to measure the horse-racing process, it has to be comparable each time the process occurs.

For example, it has to involve a horse each time. It can’t be horses one day and mules the next. It has to be the same kind of run, not a steeplechase one day and a jaunt through the park the next, not endurance racing one day and jump racing the next. When differences become too great, it is no longer the same process, and measurements are meaningless.

But teams are unlikely to perform a process consistently until it's measured. Why would they perform a process the same way every time unless they were convinced they needed to? We should not assume that they would. Horses may not want to race every time they come out of the stable. If we need them to race every time (if speed is what matters every time), we have to train them that this is how their performance will be measured, i.e. time-to-finish-line (or in the case of new product development projects, for example, time-to-market).

So which do you do first: standardize the process (i.e. document it, train practitioners in it, and establish oversight) or measure the process (i.e. decide what’s critical, define metrics, document how measurement will occur, and train everyone in measurement)? The answer is that you should enact both the standardization agenda and the measurement at the same time. Document the process for horse-racing so everyone is on the same page, i.e. the owners, the riders, or newcomers who may show up to be part of the horse racing team. But when you document the process, document how it will be measured too. Train everyone and establish oversight for consistency, but show everyone up front what’s critical about the process and how they will be measured.

“Your TEAMs ARE unlikely to perform a process consistently until it's measured.”

When you train them in the process, train them in how they will be measured, and do these together every time. As soon as you roll out a process, start measuring it regularly. If you don’t implement these two agendas of standardization and measurement together, then you will find it challenging to achieve either. If you don’t do them together, then an assessment is likely to find that you have not achieved standardization, and if you haven’t achieved standardization then you will not have achieved measurement.

Here’s a quick word about the sequence for assessing these things. There’s a difference between doing something and assessing that it has been done. Although we should implement standardization and measurement simultaneously, we should assess standardization first and assess measurement second. The relationship between assessing standardization and assessing measurement is finish-to-start. But as explained above, the relationship between implementing standardization activities and implementing measurement activities is not finish-to-start. It’s finish-to-finish.

Standardization and measurement are the necessary foundation for choosing good projects and delivering them well to implement your organization’s strategies. To become capable of implementing your organization’s strategies successfully, consistently, and predictably, you have to standardize and measure the processes for translating strategies into projects and delivering them. Other agendas follow, which will clarify the difference between “maturity” and “capability,” two concepts that nearly everyone confuses. Stay tuned for Part 3.

It was a pleasure having lunch today with India’s incoming Consul General Dr. Swati Kulkarni at her home to discuss collaboration between leaders in academia and business from the world’s two largest democratic republics. As an academic and consultant in the area of Organizational Project Management (OPM), which is strategy-implementation through projects, I noted India is the fastest growing market for project management oriented employment in the world. India’s organizations will require 70 lakh new project managers in the next 10 years. Infrastructure will be a particularly active catalyst for project management in India, especially in industries like roads and railways and initiatives like smart cities.

The honorable Consul General can help meet India’s growing demand for capable project management by fostering collaboration between Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, OPM Experts LLC, and the Indian Institute for Project Management (IIPM), which was established in 1989 by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in response to cost overruns on large infrastructure projects. Project management has continued to be a national priority under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Having arrived to her new post in America only two weeks ago, Dr. Kulkarni has acted swiftly to reach out to local leaders, demonstrating the Consul General’s proactive approach to diplomacy. Dr. Kulkarni is a career diplomat who holds M.B.B.S. degrees from the Government Medical College, Nagpur in India. She joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1995, served as Consul General in Cape Town, South Africa (2012-2014) and as Deputy Head of Mission in Muscat, Oman (2008-2012), two posts pervaded by projects.

Left to right: John Schlichter, Swati Kulkarni, and Shailesh Lakhtakia.

While in South Africa and Oman, the CGI witnessed firsthand the importance of large infrastructure projects, especially those involving water. South Africa’s water shortage has become a national crisis, and Oman’s Sultanate has made water infrastructure a national priority of the PAEW, which is currently transforming its Organizational Project Management capabilities using a model I conceived called “OPM3” to cope with rapid industrialization and a growing population base. These are some of the same challenges India continues to grapple. It will be helpful to India for the Consul General to foster dialog within India’s government regarding state-sponsored project benchmarking throughout India using an OPM3-type approach.

Dr. Kulkarni’s husband Mr. Vijay Jayant Kulkarni is a merchant mariner by profession. The couple has two daughters, who are witnessing their mother embark on her diplomatic mission in Atlanta as the first woman appointed to this post.

Most people don't realize the biggest projects in history measured in terms of costs were financial projects, not infrastructure projects, as this only became the case within the past decade. It began as an ordinary day. Israel had surrounded another West Bank city. Michael Jordan was coming out of retirement for “love of the game.” Outside the weather was 72 degrees and sunny, but inside the headquarters of The Weather Channel (TWC) in Atlanta the mood turned dark before 9AM. Stacks of monitors at the international television network switched from images of complex weather systems to images of The World Trade Center in Manhattan as word spread that a plane had flown into one of the twin towers. Chaos unfolded on TV’s throughout TWC’s Information Technology department, where I was implementing a Project Management Office on behalf of the Chief Information Officer. Gasps erupted as a second plane appeared on banks of screens and crashed into Tower Two.

My phone rang with a call from the Project Management Institute to discuss the situation unfolding in New York. A number of people in cities throughout the world were scheduled to fly to my location in Atlanta for a meeting later that day to continue developing the OPM3 standard, work that I had conceived and proposed to PMI several years earlier and which I was leading on PMI’s behalf. No sooner had the members of our team decided not to fly than all US flights were grounded. The forecast had changed.

Seven years to the day after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, accelerated computer-based trading caused a $550 billion draw-down of American money market accounts, nearly crippling the global economy in less than 24 hours. When the crisis hit historic projects like building the Hoover Dam ($78 million) and the Panama Canal ($790 million) were eclipsed by a $29.5 billion dollar bailout of Bear Sterns, followed by $97.2 billion for Bank of America, $97.4 billion for the American automobile industry, and $112 billion for AIG, which was almost as much as the $115 billion spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. This was followed by $139 billion for GE and $235 billion for Citigroup. Although the role of a healthy financial sector is to support the “real economy,” Americans began to wake up to the fact that the opposite had become the case with the tail wagging the dog (Figure 1).”

Figure 1: The financial sector toppled the economy in 2008.

Then came $300 billion for American homeowners who could not pay their mortgages, which was slightly less than the cost of World War I ($324 billion) but not as much as the $400 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. On their own any one of these projects would have ranked among the largest in US history, falling just behind record holders like the New Deal ($500 billion) and the Iraq War ($597 billion). But then one must add the $700 billion used to buy additional bad loans through TARP and a $787 billion stimulus package. In no time, the American government spent over $4 trillion on the crisis (costing more than World War II, the previous all-time record-holder). Unfortunately that $4 trillion was just the beginning, as an additional $7.8 trillion was committed, bringing the total to over $12 trillion. That is three times the cost of World War II and 24 times the cost of the New Deal, making it the largest spending program in history by far.

The tragedies of 9/11 quickly became a hallmark of our place in history: uncertainty. Dominated by globalization, almost ubiquitous connectivity, exponential increases in access to data, information and knowledge, speed, and a rich and evolving mix of partners and competitors, executives have learned that uncertainty is one of two key challenges driving the evolution of management and decision making in the 21st century. The second is the ongoing transformation of institutions and actors in organizations of all types. Riding a Khunian wave of change, executives have found themselves in an environment characterized by dynamic and high risk, which has required that they continually be able to transform and adjust to remain highly effective in extremely fluid environments. The emphasis is on acquiring, managing, sharing and exploiting information, and supporting individual and collective decision-making. In particular, executives must mature their organizations to have the ability to recognize situational change and adopt the correct management approach required to meet that change.

A new normal has emerged. We are faced with a host of so-called “third wave” and “wicked” problems, ill-defined challenges where both the problems and the solutions are unknown at the outset. The deep structures that produced this environment were long in the making, but now they unfold in the blink of an eye. Having moved from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age and into an environment characterized by uncertainty, our imperative is to cope with change and deliver change capably despite this new normal. We do this by assembling diverse capabilities into projects, projects that produce things new in kind each time, and we must do so successfully, consistently, and predictably. The process for choosing and for delivering projects to advance your organization’s strategic intent must be predictable precisely because the external environment is complex, volatile, and uncertain. The implementation of strategies through temporary endeavors has become our dominant management paradigm for the foreseeable future.

The verb "to manage" was originally derived from the Italian word "maneggiare," meaning to handle and train horses. This interesting bit of etymology got me thinking that one could demystify the way that capabilities in strategy-implementation are created by talking about it in terms of horse-racing. We are actually interested in how to help organizations become capable of choosing good projects and delivering them well to implement the organization’s strategies. That’s what we do here at OPM Experts LLC. But pretending that horse racing is our interest can be a useful thought experiment. Secretariat, Man o' War, Phar Lap, Black Caviar, and Native Dancer are some of the legendary horses from world-class racing teams. One should learn from these examples that world-class management capabilities aren't built in a day. Every photo-finish of competitors galloping across a finish line was a journey that began well before they set foot on the track. There are agendas that one must progress through.

Standardization

The first agenda or level of maturity in horse racing is called "Standardization," and it requires us to do the following:

Establish "process governance." This means we must engage the team’s owners (executives) and coaches and riders (process owners) and enroll them to help us lead the transformation of the horse racing team's capabilities.

Articulate policies. This means that we must identify what is important about the performance of the horse racing team, including which processes are most important for the horses to be able to perform in the way that their owners want them to perform.

Document processes. This means that we need to write down the essential steps of the important processes so that both the practitioners and the owners agree to them.

Train stakeholders. This means that we need to train all the necessary stakeholders in the things listed above, including the process governance structure, the policies, and the documented processes. We need to train them in a way that enables them to experience their own competence.

Establish oversight. This means that we need to implement roles and protocols that ensure consistent implementation of work methods.

These things (above) are necessary to create the foundation for building a world class horse racing team. You can see that there are aspects pertaining to the riders and aspects pertaining to the horses. The same is true for building world class performance in your project, program, and portfolio management systems. To become capable of implementing your organization’s strategies successfully, consistently, and predictably, start with standardization. Several other agendas follow, which will clarify the difference between “maturity” and “capability,” two concepts that nearly everyone confuses. Stay tuned for Part 2.

The conclave of the OLC in Virginia was not the last time NASA was involved in semi-secret knowledge management activities. A decade later I was invited to join the Federal Knowledge Management Working Group, a virtual community (which included people like me from the private sector) whose mission was to educate and support federal government departments, agencies, organizations, and their constituencies in the research, development, identification, and implementation of knowledge management activities, practices, lessons learned, and technologies. Members included David Bray, Jeanne Holm, John Bordeaux, Denise Bedford, Jimmie McEver, and many others.

When Haiti was devestated by an earthquake, we were asked for creative ideas regarding how to coordinate uncoordinated relief efforts speeding toward the island. Apart from random queries like that, we formed groups that explored how individuals and institutions can more easily distill knowledge from complexity and make policies and decisions using knowledge based processes. People asked questions like "How could simulation-scripting exercises in virtual worlds accelerate the sustained use of ontologies in the real world?” We discussed ways to leverage ontologies to help improve knowledge management, and in so doing, allow organizations to make better decisions. Some of us created standards for meta-data embedded in digital communications. Some were building the semantic web. We argued about the merits of tokenized communications used by airport control towers as a model for decentralized knowledge sharing. We brainstormed ways to preserve the knowledge of warfighters in Afghanistan when soldiers rotated out of service. I thought the group was sponsored by the US military but later discovered it was run by the FBI with support from the Secret Service and servers donated by - guess who - NASA.

What was the thread that bound all of this together? It was the same that led to the OLC. Knowledge work and, by extension, the development of standards were the OLC’s raison d'être. Organizations throughout the government and across the private sector are heavily invested in knowledge work and, by extension, in the codification of knowledge and development of standards that enable that work.

Power concerns itself with defining reality rather than discovering what reality really is.

Unfortunately the efforts of the OLC never produced a single definitive standard that integrated everyone's views about the project management body of knowledge. The IPMA had theirs, and PMI had theirs, which was published as a guide that ballooned to over 1,000 pages. Others have been proffered over the years. Such standards can have far reaching consequences, becoming the basis of individual and organizational certifications, shaping how organizations work (particularly how people from different organizations work together) across the world. As such, the creation of standards is a deeply political affair that may have as much to do with aggregating power as distinguishing prevailing practices. Bent Flyvbjerg has noted "Power concerns itself with defining reality rather than with discovering what reality really is." The major project management standards today are rather less the result of high-brow conclaves like the OLC and more the result of powerful business mechanisms, producing distillations of knowledge that take on lives of their own.

If knowledge work is pervasive, and standards are the key to knowledge work but efforts to create them are prone to failure, it’s worth pausing to ask what a standard really is. That is something I addressed in another blog post by citing the example of roads. In ancient times, roads became de facto standards as the way that travel occurred, standards in reality by fact of widespread use. That is foremost what a standard is: the prevailing practice. Tacit knowledge of the paths taken by travelers was translated into explicit knowledge in the form of maps that codified popular routes. That too is what a standard is: a paradigm or framework whose authority is asserted. The standard practices of traveling known routes were accompanied by rules or standards de jure (that is, officially or by law) like weights, measures, and coinage that enabled commerce. That is yet another way of understanding standards, i.e. as abstractions contrived to enable interaction.

Today, project management standards are an amalgamation of these things that begs the questions "This is the prevailing practice according to whom exactly? This knowledge has been codified by whom exactly? Its authority is asserted by whom exactly? And if a standard has been adopted as the rules of the game, they are the rules according to whom?" Fundamentally these are all questions of trust. Power-brokering is trust-brokering, a proposition that is undergoing a sea change for technological reasons in the 21st century.

Blockchain can put trust back into standards creation.

Today the International Standards Organization (ISO) requires those bodies it endorses as developers of standards to develop their standards in a transparent and fair manner that ensures open consensus building. But one wonders how it assures that this occurs? One may note that organizations pay money to ISO to be endorsed by ISO as accredited developers of standards. Emerging technologies like blockchain can improve trust in standards creation.

Blockchain could introduce full and immutable attribution not only of individual sources but of individual votes by individual persons to include specific content in a standard (both for and against), which could transform how an entity like ISO could accredit standards development. It could fundamentally change the nature of standards like PMI's "A Guide to the Project Body of Knowledge" (which is updated every few years by a cast of hundreds if not thousands of volunteers). It could also change how standards are published, extending to the decentralization of copyrighting.

Certified assessments of the adoption or application of a standard by an organization could be viewed as transactions that are reconciled to the original standard itself. Specific and immutable records of adoption of a practice (or failure to adopt a practice, as the case may be in any given third party assessment) could be embedded in the published standard dynamically, demonstrating whether the standard (or any part of it) is indeed a de facto standard.

With data on usage embedded into the standard, we could see which parts of the standard are used most, i.e. Pareto. We could see which kinds of organizations and users use different parts of the standard, i.e. consumer segmentation. We could compare usage (or lack thereof) to performance problems, i.e. effect stratification. And we could update these and many other dimensions dynamically, refreshing the standard with value-added information in keeping with the real world. Importantly we could cause this updating to occur without the intervention, filtering, or meddling of powerful knowledge-brokers who should recuse themselves.

φρόνησῐς or phrónēsis is understanding or wisdom relevant to action, i.e. practical virtue.

To the larger point, with emerging technologies we may be able to solve the problem that the OLC encountered in Virginia Beach nearly 20 years ago and which every effort to establish a standard since then has faced. That is, we can distinguish discrete knowledge from shared knowledge; demonstrate the extent to which any knowledge is shared; provide views of knowledge standards that are most relevant to different parties; update knowledge-based standards automatically with usage data - avoiding Orwellian dystopias like China's social credit system by applying Phronesis methodically; and in doing so, we can bypass centralized authorities or gatekeepers (whose own views of the situation are perforce limited and biased).

Through technologies like blockchain, we can add new knowledge like links added to a chain, improving knowledge for all of us with each link in an ever-growing circle of trust. Knowledge in the respective minds of practitioners that may have been buried in backroom battles can be resurrected, and the playing field can be levelled. The highly political and esoteric standards-making machinations of the few can be traded for truly transparent and decentralized knowledge creation by the many. And we don't need to be NASA's rocket scientists to realize that these things would improve the universe of project management for all of us.

Leading thinkers in the realm of project management gathered somewhat secretively in Virginia Beach in the year 2000 at a meeting hosted by NASA as part of an implicit attempt to broker agreement among the developers of the major project management standards across industry. The question was "What constitutes the definitive project management body of knowledge?" Secretive may be too strong a word because it was not a covert meeting per se, but it was named the "Operational Level Committee" precisely to make it sound uninteresting and to avoid attracting attention.

More accurately, the "OLC" was the name innocuously given to the group a year earlier at the PMI Annual Symposium in Long Beach, California to reserve a room where plans to recruit a critical mass of intellectual influence peddlers was hatched. The anti-advertising worked, and half a dozen people sat uninterupted by interlopers in an unremarkable room making a remarkable list of invitees.

In Virginia at a much nicer facility, about thirty of those invitees showed up, including David I. Cleland, J. Davidson Frame, Max Wideman, Rodney Turner, Lew Ireland, Olaf Pannenbäcker, Peter W. G. Morris, Christophe Bredillet, and me. I think Hans Knöpfel, Gilles Caupin, and Lynn Crawford may have been there as well, but my memory fails me, and there are many whose names I am forgetting. Described by one attendee as "the new blood," I was nearly half the age of anyone in this august assembly. I was breathing that rarefied air because I had been recruited to its milieu two years earlier by persons interested in having me develop the philosophical first principles of project management. As it happens I did not develop those principles. (We didn't get further than an initial principle that "A project does not necessarily need a project manager." An idea ahead of its time? #agile#holarchy#heterarchy).

Instead I agreed to investigate the possibility of creating a maturity model for project management that would be a PMI standard, and that endeavor took off quickly. I recommended to the 1998 PMI Standards Committee that we should create a maturity model for project-based organizations but that its purpose should not be simply to improve the management of projects in organizations. I asserted that its purpose should be to help organizations improve their ability to implement an organization's strategies through projects (which is quite a different thing), and I coined the term "Organizational Project Management" (OPM) to denote organizational strategy implementation through projects.

This was a significant departure from PMI's direction to date. PMI's Executive Director asked me to create and lead a team to produce such a model (which I named "OPM3"), marking PMI's first step toward a "strategy implementation through projects" paradigm. Marketing that paradigm is PMI's dominant logic today, and countless consultants, academics, and authors have followed suit. Things were moving full steam ahead by the time I arrived at the OLC.

At the outset of the meeting in Virginia Beach, the point was made that the "body of project management knowledge" exists in many places, not least in the minds of practitioners like those gathered in the room and across the world. The best we can do is craft guides, summaries, or abstractions of the inherently dispersed and evolving body of knowledge. An exercise was undertaken wherein the attendees wrote the concepts of project management down on sticky notes, one concept per sticky, filling up a large wall, signifying our attempt at canvassing the project management body of knowledge.

I suggested we make a copy of all the sticky notes and break into two groups of people so each group could organize the concepts on its own, and then we could compare results. Somebody near me immediately said "Organize this? That will never work." I said "Why not? Aristotle did basically the same thing with genus, species, and differentia." There was a collective shrug, and we set about organizing concepts.

The project management body of knowledge exists in the minds of practitioners across the world.

The décollage stretching across the wall could have been interpreted in an infinite number of ways. Terry Cooke-Davies had showed up, and I suggested to him that it would be quite interesting to put the concepts from the stickie's into textual analysis software to reveal affinity groups. The next day he was genuinely angry with me for proposing that idea because it inspired him to stay up all night doing data entry despite the fact he'd enrolled nobody to help.

I was asked to present the results of the group that I had worked with. I explained our bottom-up approach of organizing the concepts in a way that allowed a structure to emerge without a preconceived design. Then Cleland presented on behalf of the other group and deadpanned "Our group created a structure top-down, which is very good because it was not bottom-up, which is vey bad." He looked at us impassively with just a hint of amusement.

Brokering a shared view of knowledge is a negotiation.

Needless to say, each group had produced something quite different from the other, and neither mirrored what the textual analysis software suggested. At the risk of emphasizing the obvious, that was the original quandary: knowledge is, phenomenologically speaking, intentional. Or said another way, knowledge is a matter of perspective. Brokering a shared view of knowledge is a negotiation, and it is not always pretty. To paraphrase, "Standards are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." Flying thirty experts to a meeting hosted by NASA to decide what the project management universe looked like "once and for all," and thinking it would be any different from your typical sausage-making, was hubris.

For the people of Czechoslovakia, Christmas came early in 1989 when the communists were quietly overthrown. I arrived just in time for the first free elections since 1946 as the Prague Spring resumed on the heels of my eighteenth birthday to lead the first project of my career in a program named “English for Democracy." Unlike repetitive operations that produce the same thing over and over, a project is a temporary endeavor that produces a unique result: an adventure, if you will. This was no exception. As the wall came down in Berlin, and Slovakia seceded from its Bohemian cousins to the north, I delivered my project to deploy the first English classes by American teachers to the liberated Czechs and Slovaks.

The invasion by the Soviets twenty-two years earlier had been a nasty business, tanks rolling through the streets. Yet they were gone without a fight in '89, overthrown by mere students. It was called the "Velvet Revolution," the gentlest reversal imaginable, a feat of quiet resistance perfected in subordination to the Hapsburgs and later the Germans long before the Soviet regime. Stalinism, an era when workers pretended to work and enterprises pretended to pay them, was out. Capitalism was in, and everyone wanted greenbacks. The banks were limiting currency exchange, but you could get them on the black market at a rate of 30 korunas per dollar, which could buy plenty of Russian champagne in those days.

And where was this black market? Everywhere. I would walk down the street, and it would materialize as soon as I donned a New York Yankees baseball cap, the universal sign for "American," igniting the eyes of budding entrepreneurs. "Change?" they would ask.

A currency peddler confided in me "I don't want to do this forever."

"Do what?" I asked.

"Change" he said, as he exchanged his currency for mine. The unintended pun was not lost on me.

So much had changed, and it was only the beginning. I had skipped my high school graduation, packed a bag, and headed to the Eastern Bloc where students my age had led the revolt against the Soviets in Czechoslovakia. My first stop? Žilina, where my charter was to connect with a tourist agency and establish an ESL school.

The project's strategy was simple. A tourist agency was the perfect location to set up shop because it could arrange for students to travel from every corner of Czechoslovakia and across the border to adjacent countries. English was the language of democracy and opportunity, and people from anywhere in the country could come learn it in full immersion trips around the region. At first I held classes on a balcony of the tourist agency, overlooking a town square where the bust of Lenin was removed. Within a month I had over fifty students living with me, undergoing immersive training. As it grew, we had to move into a football stadium. I would lead busloads of students on road trips across the border with Yugoslavia, where Soviet rule was quickly unraveling. Communist soldiers would inspect the buses and scowl in disapproval, but they couldn't stop us.

These were the streets that gave us Franz Kafka, the literary icon of modernism, a German-speaking Czech Jew whose narratives depicted isolated protagonists in surrealistic predicaments. I could relate, running my project against a bizzare backdrop of clashing political systems giving birth to new realities.

In Prague there were something like 50 different political parties as soon as Communism fell. Each party was designated by a number. They displayed their numbers in windows on Wenceslas Square.

#7 won a majority.

Leading up to the election, I taught people what it meant "to vote." They looked at me with wide eyes, having never experienced democracy before, much less a republic. I realized how much I had taken for granted in America.

Graffiti broadcast the prevailing memes: Havel, OF, and 7.

"OF" (party #7) stood for "Občanské Fórum," which meant "Civic Forum." It was a political movement whose purpose was to unify the dissident forces in Czechoslovakia and to overthrow the Communist regime. In this, they succeeded when the Communists gave up power in November 1989 after only 10 days of protests.

Playwright Václav Havel, its leader and founder, was elected president on December 29, 1989. I watched firsthand as the Forum campaigned successfully during March and April 1990 in what were the first free elections since 1946. In that moment, the separate nations of Slovakia and the Czech Republic were born.

Currents of political change spread across the region as surely as the Vltava (or Moldau, to use the German name) washed through Prague before continuing to the Elbe and eventually the North Sea.

Images of past lives hidden for half a century ermerged in stoic forms. Without a word, this man sensed I wanted to take his photograph and nodded approval. His hat said "Salvation Army." The Communist Party had banned its activities in 1950 and imprisoned its members. This was the first time the uniform had been seen on the streets of Prague in 40 years.

A couple of long haired Rottweilers sat for their portrait as well.

The astronomical clock in Prague's Old Town Square, first installed in 1410, faithfully recorded Prague's march into a new era. A figure of Death (represented by a skeleton) struck the time. According to local legend, the city would suffer if the clock fell into disrepair; a ghost mounted on the front is said to nod its head in confirmation.

Some students took me into the hills. At a cabin, we sat in a sauna, then jumped in a frigid lake, as was the custom. Then they took me to a vast underground cave that opened up into a natural cathedral where people from far and wide had come to congregate.

Back in Prague days later, as if responding to a dog whistle on a frequency that only they heard, people poured into the streets in seconds, converging en mass from every direction in one of many gatherings that puncuated the revolution.

Crowds filled the public spaces.

At one point, there was a commotion. Everyone ran and hid as soldiers marched past us. There was a feeling in the air that anything could happen.

The old made way for the new.

Castro said we were American spies, which made me laugh. It was in the newspapers. I was pretty sure Castro thought all Americans anywhere were spies.

We were just people who supported the inevitable changes happening all around us.

Citizens celebrated, like these fiddlers under the Charles Bridge.

Memorials were erected to the fallen.

A sense of normalcy returned. At the end of the work day, men would huddle in bars just off the railroad platforms and drink beer in silence while waiting for their trains. Throughout the country, there was only one brand of beer, Pilsner, named after Plzeň, a place in Bohemia where it was first produced in 1842 when the Czech Republic was still the Austrian Empire. A recipe perfected for over a century, Pilsner may have been the one instance when having only one choice, a scarcity indicative of Communisim's central planning, was good enough.

Our full immersion classes continued, taking students on trips across the border to Budapest for example, where the people were afraid to have their photographs taken. While I was there, the Soviets withdrew, moving 100,000 personnel out of Hungary on 35,000 railway cars before the first free parliamentary election was held in May of 1990.

At a bookstore some customers discovered I was there to establish an English language school, one of the first in the country. So few people knew how to speak English back then that running a project to teach it to them gave me quasi-celebrity status. They saw I was holding a book of paintings by Albín Brunovský, widely considered one of the greatest Slovak painters of the 20th century, and offered to take me to his house to meet him.

Brunovský's son imparted to me a limited edition lithograph created and signed by Albín. It was titled "Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the heart V - War."

The month I arrived in Czechoslovakia marked the novaturient beginning of the end of Soviet rule in Yugoslavia. Refugees flooded Prague, Bratislava, and Zilina with uncertain faces. And more change was coming, tracing its way down the Danube, galloping headlong into a melee of bullets careering across Zenica and Brcko. Havel said "Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties?" More than 200,000 people would perish before peace returned to Bosnia. But in the Spring of '90, at least for a brief moment, Wenceslas Square glowed in illecebrous wonder, and all was right with the world.

Having established a national network of contacts, I had designed and deployed the classes that were the product of my project. I trained my successor, and we declared the project a success, the first of many project adventures to come. Although some projects are more of an adventure than others, and one's first project may not involve the birth of a nation, every project produces something new and unique. In a world where the pace of change is increasing dramatically, projects are essent essentialia. You can be certain that a project awaits you nearby. Are you ready for it? Where will it take you?

In any organization with many projects, although control mechanisms are created explicitly and often in a centralized manner, the projects must adjust and adapt to each other, creating new systems and subsystems that exhibit a degree of self-organization enabled by the adoption of simple rules, customs, and rituals by project teams. Simple rules create the possibility of behavior that is independent in detail and governed by higher organizing principles, i.e. emergence.

An example of an area where simple rules help in project-based organizations is project cancelation. In this context, rules are heuristics or guidelines and are not intended to do the thinking for you or to act as a replacement for the consideration and wisdom of leaders. Here are five simple rules that OPM Experts LLC created recently for a client through a one-hour facilitated working session:

1. We will suspend or terminate the project if there is a change in the market or competitive landscape.

a. “Change in the market” is defined as

i. developments indicate the demand for product(s) of the project has declined to the extent that the business case is no longer valid

ii. the external environment has rendered our strategies nonviable

b. “Change in competitive landscape” is defined as

i. the state of rivalry has made competing in this space undesirable

ii. changes in supplier power or customer power make product development too difficult

iii. or new entrants and/or substitutes invalidate the business case.

The <insert name of person or team here, e.g. Vertical Marketing Leader, Product Management Team> will proactively monitor these parameters, which will be reviewed at each stage of the project.

2. We will suspend or terminate the project if there is a negative change in the forecasted financial benefits.

3. We will suspend or terminate the project if the forecasted delivery date is delayed substantially from what had been agreed.

a. Upon presentation of feasibility studies, the forecasted delivery date is unacceptable.

b. Upon presentation of business requirements, the forecasted delivery date is unacceptable.

c. Upon approval of functional requirements, the delivery date that was forecasted upon approval of business case or business requirements is no longer within a quarter of the target.

d. At approval of final testing results, if the project closure date that had been forecasted upon approval of functional requirements is now forecasted to be delayed an additional three months, the project will be evaluated for suspension or termination.

4. The project will be suspended or terminated if it becomes technically infeasible or if a failure in testing reveals high impact risks that cannot be mitigated or transferred.

a. “Technically infeasible” means the functional requirements cannot be delivered within the constraints of the business requirements.

b. “High impact risks” are risks that could harm the customer or the company.

5. The project will be suspended or terminated if resource bottlenecks invalidate the business case.

a. When evaluating any project for suspension or termination, we will consider whether allocating resources to other projects creates a more optimal portfolio.

Simple rules like these provide a straightforward way for people to align their thinking and action-taking. They empower individuals by improving one’s ability to pursue problem solving creatively within a shared view of the situation. And as always, the litmus test for any rule is simply “Does it work?”

A couple years ago, an editor at John Wiley & Sons enrolled me to provide written feedback for a potential new edition of Using the Project Management Maturity Model: Strategic Planning for Project Management by Harold Kerzner.

I am not sure, but I do not think they moved forward with a third edition after my critique.

Here are the questions they sent me and the answers I provided.

Reviewer Questions

1. Does the material in the current edition seem to cover the major topics considered important in the field? Do any subjects appear to be too lightly covered?

No, the book does not seem to cover the major topics considered important in the field. Kerzner’s maturity model does not make sense. It is a 5 stage model. Stages one through three are essentially “standardization,” but he decomposes this as “common language” (level 1), “common process” (level 2), and “singular methodology” (level 3). Then he jumps to “benchmarking” (level 4), followed by “continuous improvement” (level 5). Historically, many maturity models have taken the 5-level approach, but this is typically a decomposition of statistical process control into “levels” or agendas. Statistical process control results in process capabilities. For this to occur, processes must be standardized (levels 1 through 3 in Kerzner), and then they must be measured, i.e. metrics unique to critical characteristics of processes must be collected and analyzed, and these critical characteristics may differ by organization depending on what is strategic to the organization. This is followed by implementation of control systems, then followed by continuous improvement once processes are “in control.” Kerzner’s model conflates measurement with “benchmarking” and then skips the control agenda entirely, leaping to continuous improvement. Benchmarking in this context does not address process capability, i.e. Cpk. Indeed, there is no reason why benchmarking itself should not occur much earlier in the model (as companies can learn much from each other pertaining to standardization). In short, the model is arbitrary, does not include aspects essential to development of process capabilities, and suggests an order to practices in a sequence that is questionable.

2. Which chapters would be most valuable to you? Least valuable?

The case studies seem least valuable. This is due primarily to two issues: 1) the cases are not clearly tied to implementation of the maturity model, and 2) the underlying maturity model itself is flawed.

3. Is the sequence of chapters appropriate? Should any chapters be deleted or combined in a revised edition?

The sequence makes sense, but there are many flaws and gaps.

The author claims there is a direct correlation between project management competency and a company’s stock price. This is a bold claim, but is not supported by any evidence.

The author repeats that there is a need for “strategic planning for project management.” However, it is not clear what the author means. Does this mean that a company’s strategic plans need to be translated into projects? By contrast, does this mean one needs to plan strategically how project management will be developed as a competency? The author transitions unclearly between these two related but distinct points.

The author states “strategic planning for project management is the development of a standard methodology for project management.” This makes no sense. Strategic planning is development of a project management methodology?

4. Please comment on the Best Practices portion of the book. Does it need updating?

Yes. See the answer to question #1 above.

5. Please comment on the case studies. Are they useful? Can they be applied across industries? What industries would you like to see represented in a revised edition?

No. See the answer to question #2 above.

6. From the material available, what appear to be the major strengths of this book? Do you have any reservations about the proposed material?

The book’s flaws overshadow the material as a whole. Yes, I have significant reservations, per the answers provided above. In addition to those reservations, the following are some minor points:

The concept of maturity is not defined clearly in the book.

Nortel may not be the best example to give to describe an organization that is implementing the model. It is said that Nortel was at stage one (lowest maturity), and as we know, they filed for bankruptcy.

In chapter one, the author claims that historically speaking, executives resisted viewing project management as a core competency because doing so required decentralization. This claim is unsupported.

7. Are you familiar with other books on this topic? Which appear to be most similar, and therefore, most competitive with this proposed volume? Do any of them provide anything that this proposal could, but does not?

PMI’s OPM3 is the leading book on this topic. In terms of things it provides which Kerzner’s does not, see the following:

Describes clearly how strategies are translated into outcomes through portfolio, program, and project management.

Clearly describes the processes of portfolio, program, and project management.

Seven years ago this month, we held a symposium at Emory University, sponsored by the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning. It was described in an agenda titled "Knowledge Futures." An exponential future continues accelerating toward us, and projects, those temporary endeavors that create knowledge and deliver change, are the management paradigm for thriving in that future.

Here were the themes of the Knowledge Futures conference:

In this complex, volatile, and uncertain world, project teams form to meet changing needs. Teams are composed of personnel who span traditional corporate and agency boundaries as ephemeral networks.

Project teams span departments, business units, supply chains, and persons who may represent other organizations or themselves as individuals peer-to-peer.

The teams come together when a project starts and disperse when a project finishes, and while this has the advantage of endless adaptation it subsequently creates the problem of knowledge loss as team members depart.

Knowledge necessary for the problem solving inherent to projects must be captured, codified, and internalized as standards for networks of projects to implement strategy capably over time. The trick is learning how to develop those standards without creating fossilized bureaucracies and the inability to adapt to changing needs.

The conference described above was preceded in June 2010 by a small gathering I organized at the Mountain Quest Institute, summarized in the following video.

PMI has adopted a new risk response strategy in the PMBOK Guide 6th Edition. That new response is "escalate." According to the PMBOK Guide 6th Edition, “Escalation is appropriate when the project team or the project sponsor agrees that a threat is outside the scope of the project or that the proposed response would exceed the project manager’s authority.” But a closer look at the sponsor role suggests there is a better way to deal with the problem that risk responses exceed the project manager's authority, a way to organize that obviates escalation, avoids inducing sponsors to micromanage, and eliminates the rampant misalignment between sponsors and project teams that disempowers those closest to the work to act wisely and with agility.

An essential role of the sponsor is to convey the project's risk appetite and risk tolerances and from this perspective to sign off on all severe risks and responses to those risks. By comparison, the project manager's role is to identify risks, develop risk responses, get approval from the sponsors for responses to severe risks, and to manage risk responses capably to resolution.

In most organizations, the sponsor is the project owner. Sponsorship is ownership. Sometimes this is delegated (or the sponsor is a proxy for the owner). Sponsors are benefactors, and as persons who provide or secure resources for projects they typically expect something in return, meaning they seek the benefits from the outputs of the projects. As such, sponsors approve success criteria, performance baselines (schedule, budget, scope), change requests (CR's) pertaining to the aforementioned things, and risk response plans for severe risks that the project faces. In this context, they "own" the project. The owner has the power to continue the project or dispose of it. Without sponsorship, a project cannot continue.

Enrolling the sponsor to distinguish the project’s success criteria, to approve the performance baseline, and to set the project’s risk appetite or tolerance effectively flattens the organization structure. If alignment is maintained, the need for escalation is obviated.

SPONSORS ARE BENEFACTORS

As the project's benefactor, the sponsors implicitly approve that the project can proceed in the face of risks. While the project manager will manage those risks, the project manager cannot decide on the project's behalf the threshold distinguishing acceptable risks from unacceptable ones. This is why the project sponsor must "own" (approve) the risks that the project manager manages. In RACI terms for project risk management, the project manager is responsible, but the sponsor is accountable. If one wishes, one may further refine these roles by distinguishing different levels of sponsors and different levels of approval for different types of risks. However these roles are defined, a project's sponsors must not transfer risks to their project teams, just as project teams must define their own success in terms of their sponsors succeeding.

Sponsors must not transfer risks to their own project teams.

BENEFACTORS SEEK BENEFITS IN RETURN

As benefactors for projects, sponsors typically seek benefits from projects in return. As such, sponsors provide a strategic perspective (linking project outputs to expected benefits), motivate the team to produce the outputs that will yield the expected benefits, and help to supply resources and dismantle issues that the team cannot dismantle themselves. To be successful in this role, sponsors must be engaged proactively in their projects, and project managers must make that easy for sponsors.

PROJECT MANAGERS OWN MANAGEMENT OF THE TRIPLE CONSTRAINT

By comparison to the sponsor role, the project manager owns management of the project, which includes schedule management, cost management, scope management, stakeholder management, integration management, resource management, quality management, communications management, and procurement management. All of these areas of management are inputs to risk management, which is a primary function of the project manager. Project managers should spend much of their time on risk management.

The project manager must ensure the sponsor is aligned and agrees with the way risks have been identified, how they are articulated, agrees that risk statements correctly distinguish what the real risk is, and that the sponsor agrees that the correct responses have been formulated by the project manager or team.

SPONSORS DECIDE THE PARAMETERS OF THE TRIPLE CONSTRAINT

Sponsors must be informed of risks and approve risk responses because the sponsor is accountable for risks in ways that a project manager simply cannot be. While the sponsor (and not the project manager) decides the organization's risk tolerance and threshold, the project manager is responsible for managing the risks. To be successful in management of the project, the project manager must enroll the sponsor(s) to distinguish how the project manager should manage the triple constraint (and the "true North" of those constraints) within an acceptable threshold of risks. This is a dialogue between the project manager and the sponsors, and it is ongoing. Sponsors typically sit on a Change Control Board (CCB) for the projects that they sponsor, which approves success criteria and performance baselines (schedule, budget, scope) at each stage of the project. Sponsors approve or decline change requests (CR's) pertaining to the aforementioned things, which may occur at any time. The role of approving success criteria and approving performance baselines and changes to these things is not the same thing as managing the triple constraint, which is project manager's role, i.e. to manage the delivery of project deliverables (specs, on time, on budget, on cost).

INCREASING MATURITY IS THE ONLY WAY TO OVERCOME THE TRIPLE CONSTAINT

The triple constraint of a project (or the "Iron Triangle") is unforgiving. Changes in one of the three constraints of schedule, budget, or scope (delivered with quality) will always require a change to another of the constraints as a trade-off. However, as the organization increases its Organizational Project Management maturity, it will become more capable. When capabilities increase, it is possible to create more project outputs, to do so faster, at a lower cost, and with higher quality WITHOUT increasing risk.

SPONSORS BALANCE RISK-AVERSION WITH REWARD-SEEKING

It's natural for the persons who seek benefits from the outputs of projects to advocate that the project produce more of those outputs or do so faster or at a lower cost or with higher quality. Those imperatives, however, often increase risk. For example, we can speed up a project by taking work that is serial in nature and re-planning it so that tasks which were serial are done concurrently, i.e. "fast tracking." But this increases risk.

Requiring the sponsors to sign-off on risks and risk responses corrects imbalance between reward-seeking and risk-aversion. It ensures sponsors remain informed and aligned. It changes the dynamic of teamwork in positive ways. It discourages adversarial relationships, encourages partnerships, and cultivates servant leadership.

IF PRODUCT MANAGERS OWN BENEFIT REALIZATION, THEY'RE NATURAL SPONSORS

Because the sponsor, who secures resources on behalf of the project, is invested in the realization of benefits from the project (which occurs after the project is finished), it makes sense for a product manager to be a sponsor on New Product Development projects (assuming that the product manager owns the product life cycle). Alternatively, a product manager may play the role of "Business Analyst," which facilitates the capturing, prioritization, and implementation of business requirements and functional requirements through the stages of the project life cycle.

ONE PROJECT, MANY SPONSORS

While it is a de facto standard that the project owner is the project sponsor, we often see that projects have more than one sponsor. In many organizations the top priority projects have both a "sponsor" and an "executive sponsor." As these names imply, this is a distinction between levels of the vertical management hierarchy, where a "sponsor" plays the primary role we have discussed (acting as the project owner or proxy, accountable for benefit realization and governing risk tolerances), while an "executive sponsor" also plays this role but is naturally an escalation point.

In addition to having more than one sponsor, projects may have sponsors from different organizations. When there are multiple organizations involved in a project, whether those organizations are internal or external, we may see sponsors from each. If I.T. undertook a project that required an extraordinary investment on the part of, say, Supply Chain, we would expect projects sponsors to include both someone from I.T. and someone from Supply Chain. If Finance undertook a project that was composed largely of employees of a consulting firm contracted to help deliver Finance’s project, one would expect the project to have a sponsor from Finance and a sponsor from the consulting firm.

ROLE SUMMARY WITH PROS AND CONS

As benefactors of projects, sponsors are naturally persons who seek benefits from projects in return.

Pro: Sonsors provide a strategic perspective, linking project outputs to expected benefits. Con: One must distinguish between the motives of sponsors who are project owners and sponsors who represent supplier organizations.

Pro: Sponsors motivate the team to produce the outputs that will yield the expected benefits. Con: Organizations are notoriously bad at managing the link between project outputs and project benefits.

Pro: Expecting benefits, sponsors help to supply resources and dismantle issues that the team cannot dismantle themselves. Con: Sponsor bandwidth is limited.

Project Managers own management of the Triple Constraint.

Pro: If sponsors set the project's goals and risk profile, project managers can manage timing, costs, and scope against risks. Con: The project manager cannot decide on the project's behalf the threshold distinguishing acceptable risks from unacceptable ones

Pro: The project manager's role is to identify risks, develop risk responses, get approval from the sponsors for responses to severe risks, and to manage risk responses capably to resolution. Con: Sponsors sometimes have difficulty understanding that those seeking benefits from the project must decide the project's risk appetite or tolerances, and that project managers cannot do this themselves.

Pro: Project managers can ensure the sponsor is aligned and agrees with the way risks have been identified. Con: When projects are failing, sponsors may suffer from optimism bias, escalating commitment.

Pro: Project managers can ensure the sponsors approve how severe risks are articulated, and that they correctly distinguish what the real risk is. Con: Sponsors sometimes fail to appreciate the importance of risk analysis and thus devote insufficient time to it. They say "That's the project managers job, and I don't need to be involved." This is, in effect, to abdicate.

Pro: Project managers can solicit sponsor approval that correct responses have been formulated by the project manager or team. Con: Sponsors may be prone to "rubber stamp" their approval of risk responses.

Pro: Persons who provide the resources necessary to enact a project (the owners) are appropriate persons to decide the project's risk appetite and tolerances. It's their investment at stake. Con: Sometimes sponsors are unable to decide risk appetite and tolerance on their own, and coordinating these decisions is a cost.

Pro: Persons who provide the resources necessary for the project are appropriate persons to approve success criteria, performance baselines, change requests, and responses to risks to these things. Con: When multiple organizations provide resources for a project, approvals for success criteria, performance baselines, change requests, and responses to risks to these things must be decided jointly.

Pro: Persons who sustain investment in the project are naturally the right people to distinguish acceptable risks from unacceptable ones. Con: Sometimes project owners prefer to transfer risk-taking to others when that is not realistically an option. In effect, they wish to abdicate by not taking a position and to do so without repurcussion, which usually is not possible.

Product Managers can be sponsors of projects, specifically New Product Development projects.

Pro: It makes sense for a product manager to be a sponsor if that the product manager owns the product lifecycle. Con: If it's not true that the product manager owns the product life cycle, then it may be a mistake to assign them the role of sponsor based soley on their title.

Pro: Alternatively, a product manager may play the role of "Business Analyst." Con: Assigning a Business Analyst does not necessarily help to identify the correct sponsors.

Projects may have multiple sponsors.

Pro: helps information processing through differentiation of the veritcal management hierarchy. Con: No two projects are ever the same, and how this is structured must be tailored to the project.

Pro: Projects may have sponsors from different organizations. Con: One must distinguish between the motives of sponsors who are project owners and sponsors who represent supplier organizations.

Although PMI has adopted a new risk response strategy in the PMBOK Guide 6th Edition, namely "escalation," enrolling the sponsor to distinguish the project's success criteria, to approve the performance baseline, and to set the project's risk appetite or tolerance level effectively flattens the organization structure. If alignment is maintained, the need for escalation is obviated. If you can overcome the challenges, you can reap the benefits.

The week after hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, we sailed down to the Caribbean and met with stakeholders across the region. Programs that respond to disasters like these have three phases:

Phase 1: Immediate disaster response. Phase 1 occurs immediately after the occurrence of the disaster event, and has emphasis of emergency response activities such as saving lives; rescuing disaster victims in imminent danger; and getting emergency food, water and shelter to survivors. Time is of the absolute essence in Phase 1.

Phase 2: Disaster relief. Phase 1 efforts will begin to transition to Phase 2 when the immediate danger has passed and activities turn to dealing with victims and refugees from the disaster. Phase 2 involves managing sometimes large displaced populations, identifying temporary shelter, and making mid-term provisions for food, water, medical treatment and other necessities (e.g., sanitation activities to avoid or mitigate the spread of disease). Cleanup activities begin in Phase 2, but only to enable disaster relief.

The myriad of uncoordinated relief efforts is like Shakespeare’s thousand twangling instruments on an isle full of noises.

These phases are linked, and there is overlap between the phases. One key enabler of effective response is the availability of descriptive and prescriptive tools and frameworks that allow decision makers and organizers to characterize the current state of response efforts across the full range of the situation.

In the short term, one of the most difficult tasks (in addition to the response activities themselves) is getting a handle of what is actually going on in the response space. What is the status of the effort? Who is involved? Where are they? What are they doing? What problems are being experienced? Collecting, organizing, and distributing this information all pose serious problems. In many cases, the information is available, but not structured and difficult to assemble or understand. The myriad of uncoordinated relief efforts is like Shakespeare's "thousand twangling instruments" on an isle full of noises.

In the current situation, news reports and particularly emerging media (e.g., social networking sites, Twitter, etc.) and other open-source data sources have played a role in getting information out about elements of the situation. These diverse and unstructured sources are particularly difficult to rationalize into a coherent picture, but mature capabilities exist to explore these varied information sources and, using technology such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) frameworks, build useful and responsive pictures of what is going on in space and time, including the discovery of relationships and networks between different organizations and activities. Such capabilities can be put to work right away to start characterizing the status of current/ongoing response activities. Once built, this picture can be used to build shared situational awareness and facilitate the discovery of challenges (e.g., hospital A is out of antibiotics) and solution alternatives (e.g., organizations/individuals who can help with hospital A’s problem).

In Phases 2 and 3, response organizations have more of an opportunity to design and/or grow the relief and reconstruction efforts – especially in Phase 3, which is usually the result of a deliberate planning effort. That said, these phases can be extremely challenging due to the scale and diversity of partners involved (and the range of agenda/visions/missions that are present), the complexity and interrelatedness of the relief/reconstruction activities, and the lack of a unified “chain of command” among the participants.

How do organizations that have the resources and sealift/engineering/logistics capabilities to respond to large scale disasters work with relief groups? Uncertainty – whether from an inability to gather and/or distribute information or from the rapid pace of change in the situation – places a premium on the ability to manage/influence the response effort (what we would call a complex endeavor). Decision making must be enabled at appropriate times and organizational locations, supporting interaction and collaboration among participants in the endeavor, and ensuring information is distributed in ways that create shared awareness of the situation.

OPM Experts LLC has frameworks that can be applied both to characterize the “as-is” response effort as well as to prescribe actions or resources that would be most effective at increasing the efficacy of the response effort through enhanced coordination and collaboration among participating entities. Our models identify the key drivers that enable endeavors to move from one level of maturity to the next, and they have been applied in a range of real-world disaster-relief circumstances. Use of such frameworks helps to benchmark relief activities and guides leadership decisions about how to organize and manage/influence relief/response work. This is especially appropriate for Phases 2 and 3 but could be of great value during Phase 1 to help identify low-hanging fruit that could pay disproportionate dividends in an extremely austere environment, e.g., the use of 802.16-based technology to establish a temporary information infrastructure quickly to de-conflict and then coordinate activities.

All the people whom we have met on our tour of the region are either eager to help or eager to be helped. While many have moved to Phase 2 (disaster relief) and Phase 3 (reconstruction), some continue to grapple with Phase 1 (immediate disaster response).

“The clouds methought would open, and show richesReady to drop upon me; but, when I waked,I cried to dream again.”― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

My flight landed in Jeddah, the largest port of the Red Sea, where I was scheduled to meet early the next morning with the mayor to begin assessing the ability of the local government to enact its strategies through billion dollar construction projects. It was the height of the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage by Muslims to Mecca, which is located just outside the city. I had done this trip before and was confident things would go smoothly despite the fantastic surge of people.

In previous visits, when I had been performing a similar project management maturity assessment for the Ministry of Interior, I had been escorted through customs in seconds. It turns out that part of the Ministry's purview is border control, one of the perks being VIP treatment at customs. But this time, I had no such luck. It took five hours! And on leaving customs I learned that my luggage had been lost!

By the time I got to my hotel, it was the middle of the night, and I had nothing to wear to my meeting first thing in the morning. I might as well have been naked in the desert. But then it dawned on me that Middle Eastern cultures are nocturnal. A simple inquiry at the front desk revealed there was a market just one block from the hotel. And sure enough, it was open despite the late hour. It was worth a shot, right?

Beyond rows of wares, nestled in a back corner of that market, lo and behold there was one rack of clothes. And at the end of that one rack there was an Italian suit! And miracle of miracles, it was my size! Just like that I was wearing a new suit and speeding off for my meeting with the mayor. What incredible luck! I swore to myself that next time I would bring a change of clothes in a carry-on bag. Like the Arabian proverb says, "Trust God, but tie your camel."

How many of us have found ourselves the victim of optimism bias, virtually naked in the desert as we set out upon a new project? It is easy to believe we are at lesser risk of experiencing a negative event compared to others, and this cognitive bias is quite common, trascending gender, race, age, and nationality. That's why it is good to trust one's capabilities but always better to verify you have them.

As the US Senate debates revisions to the Affordable Care Act this week, people on both sides of the aisle are asking how to improve the healthcare industry. Faced with the reality that the major political parties are entrenched opponents, one wonders whether social collaboration to improve healthcare could emerge in other ways. It is a question I had taken up before, when I asked myself whether organizations across the healthcare value chain could be incentivized by transparancy and reputation to optimize healthcare outcomes. Would leaders reform their organizations if they were graded publicly? From song rankings on the Billboard Charts to credit scores by Moody's or Standard and Poor's, we can see that ratings matter. Could the rating of healthcare organizations change behavior?

Specifically, could maturity assessments improve outcomes? In other words, could a health system innovation maturity model be created that motivates healthcare organizations to develop and use capabilities that improve population health, population healthcare, and the innovation of both? Buoyed by this question, four years ago I waded into the deep waters of US healthcare reform through a multi-million dollar grant proposal to establish a Congressional award based on maturity assessments (Figure 1). My idea was that a highly esteemed national award based on detailed assessments and summarized as scores or ratings could "pull" innovation from organizations to improve outcomes in creative and unpredictable ways that nobody could "push" or require organizations to innovate.

Measurement is known to change behavior. Evaluation frameworks are self-fulfilling because they shape institutional designs and management practices as well as social norms and expectations about behavior, thereby creating the behavior that they predict (Ferraro, Pfeffer, Sutton, 2005; Biggs, Bearman, Hedstrom, 2009). For evaluations of healthcare organizations to inspire change, they would need to be based on standards endorsed by the major stakeholders. We proposed to establish standards focused on population health outcomes endorsed by Medicare and Medicaid.

That's everybody, and it is precisely how Medicare and Medicaid describe “everybody.”

The mechanism was to develop and support dialogue and actions aimed at population health management goals, namely improved health, improved healthcare, cost savings (for the patient – not utilization-based cost savings), better access, and patient satisfaction.

I asked myself, “If healthcare organizations were assessed for their ability to innovate population healthcare and improve population health in ways that enact these goals, what kinds of innovations might they be inspired to conceive and create knowing the world was watching with unprecedented clarity?” I reasoned that healthcare innovation projects could take the form of vouchers and privatization that decentralized the system and removed unnecessary burdens from business. Innovation projects that enabled out-of-pocket payment (OPP) by consumers for routine medical care could transform the system from one dominated by third party payers toward a model that would put consumers in charge of their healthcare dollars, unleashing market disciplines into the equation for the first time. Public-private partnership projects could work to reform licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health-care personnel, causing prices to fall and a greater variety of healthcare services to appear on the market. Or insurance products could be developed to protect against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control; a big problem in health insurance is if you are on your own or part of a very small group, you have no leverage for prices, and if someone gets very sick, then you don’t have the protection of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people sharing the risk, but employers could band together in associations that let individuals join to buy health insurance as a group to cover high risks or even pre-existing conditions. Alternatively, I imagined, innovation could address the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. Whatever the innovations may be, I said to prospective partners and sponsors, the organizations responsible would be assessed and scored for innovation directed at improving population health and healthcare. Innovations would be evaluated for efficacy, and the ability of organizations to deliver the innovations would be characterized. Seeing clearly which organizations were actually working for the greater good (and whose good works are indeed working), consumers could make more discriminating healthcare choices.

Figure 2: Letter of Intent from Suffolk University's Office of Research and Sponsored Programs Naming John Schlichter as Principal, 2013.

Suffolk University and Emory University agreed with me, mobilized to support me in enacting my ideas, and named me the lead scientist, research group leader, and the principal assessor and improvement consultant for participating healthcare organizations for this purpose (Figure 2). We lobbied Tom Price (who soon became the US Secretary of Health and Human Services), but immediately encountered deep D.C. politics controlling decision-making in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid. Whether anything will become of my ideas remains to be seen, yet I remain convinced that something akin to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award would be a creative and low-cost way to encourage providers to improve health outcomes for individuals. Payers, providers, producers, fiscal intermediaries, and accountable care organizations would be assessed, ranked, and awarded publicly, creating ratings with financial implications.

What do you think? Do you believe that reputation mechanisms like maturity assessments, awards, and ratings can motivate organizations across the healthcare value chain to improve outcomes (quality of life years or QALYs) for individuals? Do you believe the people in positions of public service running healthcare organizations should be held to a different standard of accountability than everyday citizens whose privacy is a constitutional right? Could and should professionals who have chosen careers that afford them the esteem and privilege of securing the public’s health be motivated by us mere mortals to collaborate on healthcare innovation across the value chain? Should we motivate them by ensuring their reputations hang in the balance? You be the judge.

Meanwhile, in the timeless words of Casey Kasem, "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

Quantum materials were created that can conduct electricity at nearly the speed of light.

The world’s first fusion reactor created its first plasma; on track to produce clean energy by 2018.

Fungi in a toxic lake was discovered to produce a new antibiotic that kills super-bugs unlike anything before.

HIV infection has been eliminated in living animals through gene editing.

Researchers created the first synthetic retina out of soft tissue.

Scientists discovered how to extract ancient DNA from 240,000 year old dirt.

In this exponential future accelerating toward us, how can executives implement their strategies through projects successfully, consistently, and predictably? The answer is "SIMPLE," the "Strategy Implementation Maturity Protocol for Learning Enterprises." See https://lnkd.in/eMKAV-e